Case Study | Dunmore

The Company

Dunmore is an international design and manufacturing company specializing in coated, laminated and metallized films. With corporate headquarters located in Bristol, Pennsylvania, and additional manufacturing facilities in Brewster, New York and Freiburg, Germany, Dunmore products can be found in everything from wall coverings here on earth to vehicles traveling through space. Dunmore has made their name by driving innovation, designing and manufacturing highly reliable products, and exceeding their customers’ expectations.

The Challenge

In order to maintain their good name and to keep delivering on their commitments, Dunmore needed a solution to address the connectivity outages that were the result of a poorly performing MPLS circuit. As Vince Sullivan, IT Manager at Dunmore, put it, “We’re in two areas that have copper problems. The wind blows and a line goes bad.”

The legacy Dunmore network had an MPLS circuit between sites and Comcast Internet. When the MPLS link went down, Dunmore’s IT team had to manually reconfigure routers to establish a VPN between the cable modems and then route traffic over the Comcast connection. The process would take 15 minutes or so, and when the MPLS link came back up, they had to reverse the process. Sullivan quickly recognized how inefficient this was for his staff and the service level issues it presented to Dunmore’s internal and external customers

The Solutions

Sullivan began looking for solutions and enlisted the help of system integrator Mike Stanwick at Advanced Micro Computer Specialists, Inc. Together, they decided that the next generation solution needed to provide uninterrupted access to business-critical systems, increased network resiliency, simplified management of Dunmore’s phone system and finally they wanted to reduce the overall expenses associated with connectivity.

After trying a solution that didn’t work, Dunmore selected and deployed Ecessa PowerLink®, which provides automatic failover in the case a line goes down.

Using Ecessa Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) features, the VPN uses both ISP links and stays operational, even when one of the ISP connections fails.

In addition to PowerLink they also implemented a Broadview cloud-based hosted VoIP solution. With the Broadview system, all calls are routed through the cloud, so flawless connectivity is imperative. Sullivan uses Ecessa’s SD-WAN features to route voice traffic over the preferred primary link and fail it over to the other link if primary link failure is detected.

Sullivan enjoyed working with Ecessa’s technical team through installation and for continued support. He admitted there were a few road bumps during deployment, but overall it was painless and Ecessa’s team helped get them up and running quickly. “Ecessa’s team is always there for me. They have the best networking technical support I’ve ever experienced.”

The Results

“Our uptime has been improved dramatically. In the past year our wide area network hasn’t been down at all, versus about 6 times per year before,” said Sullivan.

VPN performance has also improved. “In the past 6 months, our Comcast Business circuit has gone down about 12 times per month. Most times it is only for a few seconds but that would cause serious problems to our VPN if the PowerLink wasn’t balancing our internet circuits. As we are configured today with two ISPs on each side, service was never interrupted.”

In addition to network resiliency, Dunmore more than tripled connection speeds without increasing budget. “We spend about the same money today on fiber internet service as we did in our old MPLS configuration. However, the speed has increased about 3X in New York and 10X in Pennsylvania.”

Support costs have been reduced. “The Ecessa devices are easy to manage. The simplified networking and software-defined control has freed me up to work on other projects. We’ve been able to drop support contracts on more costly networking hardware we no longer need.”

Now when there’s a link failure, Sullivan gets an email alert. Instead of rushing to manually reconfiguring hardware and cables, he can relax. He knows that without lifting a finger, the VPN and VoIP have automatically failed over and everyone in his organization has uninterrupted access to their business systems. “Our network is more resilient. The product just works.”